What is Global Money? Reflections on part two of FGPE

by Johnna Montgomerie

The second part of this module integrates our detailed understanding of money creation, banks as institutions,the calculative practices of financial markets, and the logic of Austerity covered in the first part, and begins to put 'finance as credit' into a global geopolitical system.

We begin by considering credit-debt money as part of a wider system of global money, or a globally integrated set of norms, institutions, and actors that is much bigger than one currency, one nation, or one bank. Or, the whole of the global finance system is bigger than the sum of its financial actors' parts.

The reason we start with Nigel Dodd's (LSE Professor of Sociology) book the 'Social Life of Money' is to ensure we start as we mean to go on, by reconnecting with the social theories that underpin the academic literature on finance. Chapter 1 'Origins' is a tour de force in terms of offering a comprehensive and authoritative summary of the entire literature of social theories of money. Take from me, I had to read the three rows of books in the library that he summarises and it is really impressive literature review. Depending on your own proficiency with social and political theory, this chapter provides useful categories for describing the main thinkers understanding of what money is: barter, tribute, quantification (medium of exchange), mana, language and violence. Each offers a compelling interdisciplinary summary of theories of money.

Dodd's own contribution to this is to argue that money is a verb, a form of action, doing, and transformation - not a noun, a thing that is stored, exchanged, quantified and valourised. It is significant because puts the focus on what makes money move, not just exist. Also, Dodd calls out the explicit moral confusion over money as debt inherited by the 'classical' school of political economy that saw debt as a malevolent force in society. This argument is interesting because it offers a way of re-politicising money in a financialised society by looking at its effects as a force for society.

This argument aligns with our earlier reading of Anne Pettifor's book, which sought to explain why the democratic reform monetary policy is necessary and possible. Now we put this policy argument about the macro-economy into a wider academic literature that understands money as a social relation, not simply a functional equivalence for trade of goods and services.


Phillip Coggen's (Financial Times Journalist) book Paper Promises: Debt, Money, and the New World Order offers an alternative reading of the history and theory of money. The assigned chapters, the Introduction and Chapter 1 ‘The nature of Money’, are written in a highly accessible style and provide an historical reading of money as an age-old conflict between creditor and debtor.

Coggen clearly articulates the moral economy of debt that Dodd criticises because it reduces money to a function of the nation state to resolve conflicts over the allocation of scarce resource. A creditor is good, a debtor bad, but the both need each other so its best way to manage this social relationship is to create a strict rule of law to enforce the banks right to create debt money and enforce interest payment contracts.

Reading these authors side-by-side offers each student the opportunity to see the political and academic debates about money. Money is politics, money is not just a social relation but also a power relation.This debate includes a much wider array of elite commentators, Adair Turner (former FSA director), Andy Haldane (Chief Economist, Bank of England) and John Kay (journalist).

In your further readings, I encourage you to use some of the library resources available on finance, not just what is in our shared folder.

Goldsmiths offers courses on financial crisis in the economics department, sociology, media and communications, visual cultures - this means there is a wealth of resource to supplement one extra reading. Perhaps not this week, because this is already a lot to cover.